The Yekke Kitchen

Who are the Yekkes?

Yekke (that’s YEK-uh) is the affectionate name for Jews whose roots run through the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Alsace and the old Bohemian and Moravian towns.

Nobody agrees entirely on where the word came from. The likeliest story is that it comes from the German Jacke, meaning jacket, because German Jews kept wearing their short tailored suit jackets while their Eastern European cousins wore longer traditional coats. Over time it grew into a gentle stereotype. Yekkes were the punctual ones, the orderly ones, the people who arrived exactly on time and wrote everything down. People usually say it with a smile, often Yekkes about themselves.

That same precision shows up at the table. A Yekke recipe tends to be exact, a Yekke Shabbat tends to start on the minute, and a Yekke cook tends to know precisely how her grandmother did it.

The oldest branch of the family tree

Here is the part most people never learn. German Jewish cooking is not a curious side dish of Jewish history. It is closer to the root.

The word Ashkenaz itself was the medieval Hebrew name for the German lands. A thousand years ago, the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, in cities like Speyer, Worms and Mainz, became the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry. The customs, the prayers and yes, the foods that took shape there slowly spread east over the centuries. So when we cook Yekke food, we are cooking from the elder kitchen of the whole Ashkenazi world.

A kitchen shaped by two worlds

Yekke cooking is what happens when hearty German regional cooking meets the rules and rhythms of Jewish life.

German food loved pork and cooked in lard and butter. A kosher kitchen could do neither, so Jewish cooks reached for goose, for beef, and for rendered goose and chicken fat, the beloved schmaltz that gives so many of these dishes their soul. The laws of kashrut kept meat and dairy apart, shaping entire menus. And because no fire could be lit on the Sabbath, cooks invented dishes that could sit in a low oven overnight and be ready, rich and tender, for Saturday lunch.

These constraints led to real invention, not compromise. The limits are the reason the food is so distinctive.

The flavors of the Yekke table

If one taste says Yekke, it is sweet and sour. Süß-sauer runs through this cuisine, from sweet-and-sour brisket to sweet-and-sour fish, echoing the sauerbraten traditions of the German countryside.

A few dishes sit at the heart of it. Berches, sometimes spelled Barches, is the German Jewish challah, often made with potato worked right into the dough for a tender crumb quite unlike the challah most people know. Schalet, the German cousin of cholent, is the slow Sabbath stew that cooks overnight, so beloved that the poet Heinrich Heine, himself a son of German Jewry, once wrote a mock hymn crowning it a ray of heavenly light. Roast goose was the great celebration centerpiece, its fat saved and treasured for months. And then there is the baking, an entire world of it. Honey cake for the new year, plum cake and crumb cake cooling on the windowsill, the refined café-influenced sweets of a proud middle-class Jewish Germany.

Scattered, and remembered

The communities that made this food were shattered in the Holocaust. What survived, survived in the hands of those who fled.

Some carried these recipes to Britain. Many carried them to Palestine, the Yekkes of the 1930s who brought German order, coffee culture and plum cake to a young country. And a great many carried them to New York, to the streets of Washington Heights, a neighborhood so full of German Jewish refugees that people fondly called it Frankfurt on the Hudson, complete with its own German Jewish bakeries and butchers.

But in America the story was told mostly by others. Eastern European Jews had arrived far earlier and in far greater numbers, and their food became, in the popular imagination, simply “Jewish food.” The Yekke kitchen slipped quietly into the background, kept alive in family homes rather than delis and cookbooks.

Why this kitchen exists

That is exactly why The Yekke Kitchen is here.

This food nearly disappeared, carried out of Europe in memory more than in print. Every honey cake, every loaf of Berches, every pot of sweet and sour brisket is a small act of remembering. When we cook these dishes, we set a place at the table for the people who first cooked them.

So pull up a chair. There is history in every bite, and it deserves to be tasted again.